Sub-Assembly Philosophies and Stuff

Don_Van_Zile

I'm starting to look into best methods to keep things organized while working within the context of a Part Studio (Master Model Parts), the Top-Level (Main) and Sub-assemblies. I know coming from Solidworks the more sub-assemblies that are used the better for many reasons and performance is one of them along with keeping a cleaner Feature List and easier to work with too. Since dynamic mates (Parts with motion) still move even in upper-level assemblies all the way to the top. This makes creating sub-assembly "thinking" much less rigid in regard to what moves and what doesn't (no "Flexible" philosophy to deal with in Onshape ). This is great and new degree of freedom with what could potentially be made into a sub-assembly.

That said, would there be any gotcha's to look out for or other comments/suggestions to keep in mind for users who worked with large assemblies? I know this post from @philip_thomas in another thread are things to keep in mind to be sure (new user stuff!)



One of the things we used to have to do for the BOM for Sub-assemblies that were created for simplicity reasons and not because they were an actual sub-assembly part number in our system was the "Hide/Show" option for the "Child component display when used as a subassembly". Anybody else remember using this? This was really handy for the BOM and using the "Parts only" and the real subs that had part numbers wouldn't expand and the "dummy" ones for organization and simplicity were still expanded so you would have to worry about the BOM structure with dot numbers etc... you had control of the BOM display using this method which was really nice. What I see now is if we create subassemblies for simplicity we lose this flexiblity from what I can see so far. Sure, you can manually expand, but you get the dot numbers which isn't expected or wanted in this scenario. 

Solidworks Option





One of the common requests is to be able group components in folders and I see creating subassemblies as work-around where they can be used that makes sense. Something that came to mind was to try and put all the Std Content Parts into their own sub-assembly as shown below. Again, adding hardware quickly starts to make a mess of the List even in small assemblies. Any gotchas with this method? This is where the mates and mate connectors "moving up" as Phil mentioned can be taken advatage of for these items and just have a sub-assembly dump location if you will.



Also, which is just a minor thing is there is no visual differentiation between what would be considered the "Top-Level" assembly and subassembly in regard to the icons. You can rename them, but I shouldn't have to. When assemblies get larger unlike this simple example it gets difficult to determine, especially other people's docs moving forward.

Anyways, looking for open discussion/thoughts and "learn from experience" would be welcome as my cogs are spinning in a good way!